Reassembly of the Eee PC 901

As usual, this is just the previous section but in reverse. Hopefully you won’t have any screws left when it’s back together.

Now the reassembly is just as hard if not harder. You have to be as careful as possible not to put your statically charged body parts all over the circuitry of the Eee PC.
I found that the screw holes on the new SSD didn’t line up with the holes on the motherboard. So if you have a very small round file you can file them bigger, or some very small side cutters, clip them bigger. That’s what I did as I didn’t have a file small enough to get through the holes. Now the screw heads wouldn’t hold the SSD down any more. Zip ties to the rescue.

Now when you put the motherboard on the plastic base, you need to plug the cable for the bottom row of LED’s back in and the CPU fan (you can see these in my previous post). Then put the top two screws back in.

Next step is to plug the mouse cable into its socket (highlighted by the red box below). this is really fiddly.

Then plug the cable that takes the signal from the 4 top buttons above the keyboard into its socket.

Next is to plug the keyboard ribbon back in to its socket. I found the method of least friction to be through the top piece of sheet metal. What I did here was to hold the ribbon down flat and keep a little pressure on top of the ribbon and directed into the socket while with long nose pliers a push on each side in sequence until the ribbon was all the way in. Again this is quite fiddly.

Put the top half of the plastic chassis back on in reverse to how it was removed… top first, then work your way down the sides. Put the six screws back into the panel under the keyboard. Flip the device, install the 16GB SSD and the RAM module. Put all the screws back in and that should be it.